Talk:Diaeresis

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Contents 1 Reference 2 Catalan 3 In English 4 IJ 5 Galician 6 Diaereses in "diaeresis" 7 coefficient 8 Trema 9 Bad link 10 Spanish 11 Examples

[edit] Reference

The reference for the ugly Trema/Umlaut hack is [1] Pjacobi 09:42, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Catalan

The indicated pronounciation for Catalan veïna is specific to the Barcelonian dialect. Others pronounce it as [ve'ina], for example in Valencia; of course all the intermediate possibilities may also be encountered.

[edit] In English

In English, does the diæresis (got a "æ" key on my keyboard, why not use it :) vanish when syllable division occurs between the two vowels? Like:

Bla bla coöperate bla bla co-
operate bla bla.

This how it is done in Dutch, and it makes some sense given that the word breaking clearly separates the two vowels and that the diæresis would thus be redundant. Thanks for the answer.

In English, we don't actually use the diaeresis much, the one example I can think of is daïs. Occasionally I've seen one on naive though I suspect it to be spurious. By convention, "cooperate" doesn't have one, though ideally it should be hyphenated as "co-operate" anyway. Chris 06:35, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Naïve is a correct spelling. Coöperate has become out-of-fashion, but it's still used by The New Yorker, I think. 'Cooperate' without a hyphen is a misspelling. —Michael Z. 2005-03-15 14:39 Z

Cooperate is perfectly acceptable spelling. In the Oxford English Dictionary, none of the 17th century cites use a hypen or diaresis, and the latest cite, of a 1882 publication, spells it "cooperate". --Prosfilaes 06:53, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] IJ

Just wondering why this page states that the ij ligature is "discouraged", when the main IJ (letter) page makes no mention of that? 143.252.80.124 12:46, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Galician

The paragraph on Galician use of the diaeresis is not written in any dialect of English that I recognise ... In particular, what does "standed" mean? Some corrections are necessary. 203.12.157.29 18:31, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Diaereses in "diaeresis"

If you were using the conventions used by the New Yorker (e.g. coöperate), wouldn't you spell diaeresis as diäeresis? 10:44, 25 October 2005

No. The diaeresis is used to distinguish a digraph from a sequence. There is no digraph "ia" in English, so every time you see "ia", you know to read them separately. On the other hand, "cooperate" would be read as "coo-pe-rate" by normal English rules, so a diaeresis would be used to break it up. (Similarly, you wouldn't spell it "diaëresis", because the "ae" here is a digraph. Another option is "diëresis", which makes sense because "ie" is a digraph, but we don't want to use one here. I've never seen it, but—the people who drop the "a" are also usually the sort to skip diaereses.) A similar line of thought could be applied to "mediæval" vs "mediëval" vs "medieval"—tho I understand the originaters of the "medieval" spelling, being americans, are also inclined to pronounce the "ie" as a digraph anyway giving three syllables where god meant there to be four. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 13:21, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Writing and speech

The article would do well to distinguish the two-dots diacritic from the phonetic reality of dieresis. There are plenty of cases where we pronounce a dieresis but would be taken for weirdos if we used the diacritic (e.g. create), as well as cases of where the orthography has the diacritic but people say a monophthong or diphthong. An example of the latter is of people called Noël having their name pronounced /nol/.

[edit] coefficient

• ... yet in both languages the o and the e and the i an the e are pronounced separately.

Does one not pronounce the final syllable as "sjent"? with "ci" as a hissing noise? Maybe it's my un-nativeness. Zanaq 14:40, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm a native speaker, and I pronounce it more or less as "shjent".--Prosfilaes 23:21, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Glad to hear I´m not totally insane. thanx. Zanaq 10:59, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trema

As I understand it, the diacritical mark ¨ itself is what is called trema. It can mark either a diaeresis (the division of two adjacent vowels discussed in this article) or an Umlaut. If this weren't the case, there would be no word for the "two little dots" themselves. Therefore, the German Wikipedia has separate articles de:Trema for the "dots" and for their function as diaeresis and umlaut. Hence I think that Trema shouldn't be a redirect to this article but needs an own article with links to Diaeresis and Umlaut. Gestumblindi 01:46, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I have only rarely heard trema as an English word. It isn't in the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, or Merriam-Webster's. Normally in English, I think we just use the word "diaeresis" for both the diacritic and the division of one syllable into two. This is similar to "umlaut", which denotes both a sound change process and a diacritic. Lesgles (talk) 03:38, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

 : Unicode calls it a diaeresis, and I've only heard trema used for non-umlaut functions of diaeresis in a German context. I think the current division is probably best for English.--Prosfilaes 03:42, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

let's be clear that this is the article on diaeresis, the separate pronunciation of two adjacent vowels in various languages. The diacritic used to indicate this is treated at umlaut (diacritic)=diaeresis (diacritic). dab (ᛏ) 09:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

At least the article Umlaut (diacritic) is confusing things in that it states wrongly that trema=diaeresis as opposed to umlaut (diacritic), even talks about The need to distinguish between Umlaut and Trema - whereas "trema" in fact is nothing but the name of the two dots that are used for umlaut (diacritic) als well as diaeresis. So, there is in fact a need to distinguish between umlaut (diacritic) and diaeresis, whereas the trema is encompassing both. Gestumblindi 16:58, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

This is not clear. On the Unicode mailing list [2], (username unicode-ml, password unicode), Marc Wilhelm Küster wrote "On the one hand, DIN 5007 (the German ordering standard) indeed distinguishes between umlaut and trema, handling them quite differently." and Asmus Freytag [3] wrote "If there is anything in UCA that would make it impossible to design correct collation tables for German university libraries, when CGJ is used with Trema, but not for umlaut, then you have an issue." If there really was a clear distinction, I would think someone would have pointed it out on the linguist- and typographer-heavy Unicode list. From years on the list, Asmus Freytag has struck me as a generally reliable source of information.--Prosfilaes 17:42, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, sounds convincing. Gestumblindi 01:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad link

The table of diacritics still links to the umlaut mark. Personally, I think it's a bit pedantic to distinguish the two based on minor typographic variations, but if you're going to do that you should change the links accordingly. FilipeS 15:37, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind. I've dealt with it. See diaeresis (diacritic). FilipeS 23:19, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spanish

Spanish wikipedia has lots of useful info and background. Someone should translate and merge. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%A9resis

[edit] Examples

Oogamia/oögamia;

Thanks, but that's rather obscure and high-falutin'. :-) FilipeS (talk) 23:07, 20 April 2008 (UTC)